The paperwork of history

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 1:57 PM - 24 Comments

Here is the policy agreement presently being hashed out between the British Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. There doesn’t appear yet to be a published governance agreement, but the Times has a useful FAQ.

For the sake of comparison, here is the unholy, treasonous governance accord signed by Stephane Dion and Jack Layton a year and a half ago. And here is the unholy, treasonous policy accorded signed by Mr. Dion, Mr. Layton and Gilles Duceppe.

Well removed from the discord of December 2008, it is probably worth evaluating those documents on their written and structural merits. Both for the sake of assessing the past and, one imagines, the possibilities of the future.

Racing to stem the tide

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Gerald Herbert/ AP/ Getty Images

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and burst into flames off the coast of Louisiana last month, it seemed for a time that the most lasting repercussions would be the grief felt by friends and relatives of the 11 crew members who died in the blast. Two weeks on, however, the leak that sprung when the rig sank is devastating the region’s fishing industry and threatens to cause an ecological disaster should the ever-growing oil slick hit land in force. Efforts to contain the slick have been hampered by foul weather. But anything that might block or divert oil from fragile coastal wetlands is at best a temporary solution, given that up to 5,000 barrels (almost 800,000 litres) of oil continue to gush into the ocean every day.

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When it's not a big enough incentive

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

It’s been a gruelling six months for Toyota. The world’s biggest automaker has recalled nine million cars, trucks and SUVs since last November and paid an embarrassing US$16.4-million fine in the United States. The penalty was related to its foot-dragging over safety recalls, including those stemming from complaints about sticky gas pedals and floor mats that trapped accelerators in the wide-open position. But after watching sales plummet during the first two months of the year, Toyota bounced back with consecutive months of year-over-year sales increases in the U.S.—up 41 per cent in March and 24 per cent in April.

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The Habs: Giant-Killers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:43 PM - 1 Comment

Who knew Trotsky was so funny?

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 7 Comments

Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Leon Trotsky would have been amused. Seventy years after dying in Mexico from the blow of an assassin’s ice axe to the head, the iconic Soviet revolutionary has finally become a pop brand, thanks to the Canadian taxpayer. Funded by the federal and Quebec governments, The Trotsky is a $6.4-million comedy about a Montreal high school student who believes he’s the reincarnation of the Red Army hero. An unlikely hit on the festival circuit, this gem of Commie camp drew rave reviews at New York’s Tribeca festival last week, after winning audience prizes in Japan and Bulgaria. And at a festival in Siberia, of all places, where Trotsky was once imprisoned, it won the Russian Union of Film Critics prize. Montreal producer Kevin Tierney was in Siberia to accept the honour, which came in the form of a white porcelain sculpture of father-son elephants.

“It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. But the trophy was oddly fitting—The Trotsky was written and directed by Jacob Tierney, the producer’s son.

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Week in Pictures: May 7th – 13th 2010

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:32 PM - 0 Comments

Don’t pack the wrong passport

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 5 Comments

Hélène Scherrer was looking forward to a week’s worth of sunshine when she packed her bags and headed to Mexico last month. What she got instead was a close-up view of the ongoing diplomatic spat between Canada and its southernmost NAFTA partner.

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Day 16 of 14

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:19 PM - 23 Comments

The parties began meeting this morning and, after a break at some point, will continue through the afternoon. I’m told it could be a long day.

Navy being put out to sea

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:11 PM - 9 Comments

A massive budget shortfall brought on by the war in Afghanistan and changing military priorities is causing a huge reduction in the size of the navy. The number of Kingston-class maritime coastal defence vessels will shrink from 12 ships down to six, and a further three frigates will be put on limited duties. The HMCS Toronto and Ottawa and destroyer HMCS Athabaskan will have their combat systems cut back to sensors and communications only, while Protector-class supply ships will no longer be able to use a key weapon meant to destroy incoming missiles. “I have had to make difficult choices that will directly impact fleet capability and availability this year and possibly for the medium term,” wrote Vice Admiral Dean McFadden in a letter sent out to naval formations. “I fully recognize the challenge that these capability reductions will cause.” The cuts come as the navy launches an expensive program to modernize its Halifax-class frigates and begins to concentrate more on maintaining its submarines. “This is some happy 100th birthday isn’t it?” said Liberal senator Colin Kenny, former chairmen of the senate defence committee. “It means for the next few years there won’t be much of a navy.” However, Kenny said McFadden has made the right choices with the cards he’s been dealt. “If the Harper government is screwing him this badly I think he is making the right decision to protect the core of the navy.”

Montreal Gazette

LOST Will Be Fine

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:09 PM - 15 Comments

After Lost devoted its antepenultimate episode to an hour of beginning-of-time mysticism and Biblical allusions, there was a lot of fear that they’re heading for a finale that will annoy everyone, and perhaps even drag down the reputation of the entire show with it. (Look at The Sopranos. There were, and are, a lot of people who liked the finale — but the cultural backlash against the show probably has a lot to do with the sense many people had that they were let down by the finale, that the whole show was revealed as not having a point.) The idea being that at a time when the show needs to provide satisfying answers, its answers are becoming even more confusing than the questions, and there’s no way they can wrap it up in only one full-length and one double-length episode. When it comes to “Across the Sea” as an episode, it’s not a problem for me; unlike Buffy trying to introduce those awful “evil men and wise women from ancient times” segments in its last months, this kind of mystical wackiness has always been an organic part of Lost, and it pretty much had to get its own episode before the series ended. But in any case, I don’t think the finale of Lost is going to disappoint that many people, and here’s why:

Lost has a fixed conclusion. If they take it, that gives the audience closure. And if we get closure, many of us accept any number of loose ends.

By “fixed conclusion” I don’t actually mean that it can only end one way. But there is a way to end the show that would give it a sense of finality: everybody (who’s left alive and/or has come back from the dead) gets off the island. Forever. Whether they want to leave or not. It’s the same fixed conclusion that Gilligan’s Island had, except that show was canceled before they could get off. Lost is much more than a story of people stranded on an island, but… it’s still a story of people stranded on an island. I don’t know how the finale will play out, but I’m definitely guessing that it will bring that story to an end in some way or another. They were Lost. Now, at least in the literal, non-mystical sense, they’re no longer Lost. It’s like the bus was no longer Speeding at the end of Speed. Not all shows have obvious endings, because not all shows are about extreme circumstances. (There is no obvious ending to a show about a family or a workplace, though there are several options the writers can choose from to create closure.) But some shows can really only end one way. Take M*A*S*H. We knew from the very first moment that the show was over when the war ended. The war ended, the M*A*S*H unit was disbanded, and the world was happy. Getting off the Island is Lost‘s equivalent of ending the Korean War, and it can cover up a multitude of sins, even if they spend the last two hours with a character crying about a chicken and a baby.

The finales that anger people the most are often the ones that provide no closure whatsoever, and the angriest reactions of all are to the shows that set up an ending with the very first episode, and then don’t provide that ending. Remember Quantum Leap? We were told every week that Sam’s goal was to stop leaping and get home. When that happened, the show was over. And then the final episode informed us that “Dr. Sam Becket never returned home.” (Tacked on to a show that wasn’t really supposed to be a finale, but nonetheless, “Sam Becket eventually returned home” might have been a better way to go. Or “Sam Becket died after returning to his home planet.”) And those words have been inspiring fits of rage ever since.

This is why I don’t think Lost will leave the majority of viewers unsatisfied unless they pull a Quantum Leap and don’t give us the ending we were promised. Most people who watch a show, even who watch it every week, are not ferociously committed to one view of what the show should be; that’s for very passionate fans of the show (often those who post about it online). So the show has a lot of leeway in the answers it chooses to give or withhold, or what side of itself (sci-fi, survivalist adventure, character drama) it chooses to emphasize. But one thing the majority of viewers won’t accept is the feeling that an implied promise has been made, and then broken. Seinfeld made people angry because it broke an implied covenant with the viewers: for years, we had followed and liked these people in spite of their flaws, and then the show turned around and told us we should never have liked them, that they’re horrible people. The covenant Lost has made with its viewers is that it will follow the story of people on a mysterious island where nothing makes sense, and we will watch them until they’re permanently off the island and can’t ever come back.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s no way a show can screw up a fixed ending. Battlestar Galactica (2004 division) had a fixed ending and managed to blow it anyway, at least in the eyes of many of its fans. Who knows what kind of bizarre ending Lost might come up with, or how they might manage to make “getting off the island” seem like it’s not really an ending at all? But since the creators of Lost are not idiots (which is why they’re still standing and all their imitators have crashed and burned) I’m still willing to predict that they will know enough to provide that basic sense of closure: what we have seen for the last six years cannot continue, at least not in its original form.

And then, on the other hand, they might just put up a caption that says “And nobody ever got off the Island.” But if they do, then you’ll see some real anger.

A trail of underage smokers

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

iStock

Nova Scotia is the place to be if you’re 17 and want smokes. According to a recent study by the Canadian Cancer Society, a third of retailers in Nova Scotia are willing to sell cigarettes to 17-year-olds, by far the worst record of any province (Alberta was the second biggest offender).

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PI has no evidence on Guergis

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 11:56 AM - 4 Comments

Testifying before the House of Commons government operations committee, Derrick Snowdy, a private investigator who was looking into Nazim Gillani, the business partner of Helena Guergis’ husband, on behalf of investors, says he has no evidence against the former minister who was kicked out of the Conservative caucus. “I have nothing—I have no evidence, or no information, with respect to conduct of Ms. Guergis in my possession or knowledge,” he said. Snowdy was hired by investors worried that Gillani, a Toronto businessman, was defrauding them. He witnessed Guergis and Jaffer eating with the businessman, and went to the Conservative party to warn them about the relationship, which resulted in the ousting of Guergis on April 9. “Mr. Jaffer is Mr. Gillani’s business partner. They are in a business relationship. So this is an issue of optics,” he testified. “When the minister for the status of women is dining in a restaurant with a man awaiting trial on serious crimes and with a history of serious criminal activity, and an escort … how would the Hill here have responded to that photograph or that video showing up?”

CBC News

Prostitutes arriving in Johannesburg

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

South African restaurant and hotel owners are hoping that the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg will spur a tourism boom. But there’s another brand of entrepreneur hoping to hop on the World Cup bandwagon: prostitutes. Reports indicate that prostitutes from impoverished Zimbabwe are traveling to Johannesburg in droves, in anticipation of next month’s soccer fest, which will draw an expected 500,000 fans. By most estimates, as many as 40,000 sex workers will arrive over the next few weeks. “If ever there was time to make money, this is the right time,” one 22-year-old prostitute told reporters. “I am convinced that after the World Cup, I will be able to buy my own car,” said another, who traveled over 1,700 miles by bus to get to the South African capital. Human rights groups are calling on South Africa to take measures against human trafficking.

Christian Science Monitor

Hunting for once-buried treasure

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Tom Andrews

Thousands of years ago, hunters in the Northwest Territories began climbing onto thin bands of snow on the slopes of the Mackenzie Mountains in pursuit of caribou fleeing the summer heat and insects below. Today, likely due to global warming, these ice patches have shrunk—“they’ve melted more in the last few years than in the last 3,000,” says University of Calgary geologist Brian Moorman, who studies the formations—exposing perfectly preserved artifacts of ancient hunting life. Researchers are racing to salvage this frozen history.

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Listening to Peter MacKay

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 11:24 AM - 19 Comments

Pursued in succession by Claude Bachand, Bob Rae and Jack Harris on the matter of Afghan detainees, Defence Minister Peter MacKay was made to stand six times in QP yesterday, responding with his usual mix of assurance and impatience. Three of those answers constitute a particular, and particularly remarkable, series. Those answers were as follows, reprinted here with emphasis added as necessary.

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Oklahoma’s tough new abortion laws

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 11:17 AM - 19 Comments

AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano

New legislation in Oklahoma means a woman seeking an abortion will have to undergo an ultrasound at least one hour before having the procedure, and listen as a doctor describes the fetus’s heartbeat, organs and lungs—even in cases of rape and incest.

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Bestsellers

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of May 10th, 2010)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

A summer of lust in a Tuscan castle

By Mike Doherty - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Richard Saker

In a corner of Martin Amis’s living room in London, watched over by elegantly sombre paintings, stands a bright-orange pinball machine called Eye of the Tiger. “It’s a really good one,” says the renowned novelist. “I’m getting worse and worse at it. All that flow of youth is gone.”

At 60, Amis increasingly finds himself in a retrospective mood. He’s too irreverent to be an éminence grise, but he’s no longer the notorious enfant terrible of English letters. Lately, he’s been helping to nurture the talents of budding authors at the University of Manchester and Toronto’s Humber School for Writers, and in his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, his famously coruscating humour is more benign than ever before, leaving ample room for emotion.

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Time to open the mailbag

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 8:52 AM - 46 Comments

Submit your queries below. Or don’t. What am I, the boss of you?

A sweeter sound

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 12 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

For over 10 years, music piracy has been the recording industry’s bogeyman. But Jimmy Iovine, head of Interscope Records, has another beef with digital music: a lot of it “sounds like crap.” As labels scrambled to contain the threat posed by file-sharing services like Napster, they “did nothing about the disintegration of digital sound,” Iovine told Maclean’s from his home in L.A. With the proliferation of cheap earbuds, cellphone MP3 players, and tinny laptop speakers, we’ve lost the “emotion of the music,” he says—the range and richness of sound that artists intended us to hear, and in many cases, spent tens of thousands of dollars in studios creating. “Degrading content is just as severe as piracy,” he says. “I call it a digital revolution that went terribly wrong.”

Iovine is looking to “fix the entire ecosystem,” from headphones and sound files to computers. In 2008, he founded Beats Electronics with music producer Dr. Dre, and partnered with Monster Cable (a high-performance cable manufacturer) to launch Beats by Dr. Dre, a line of high-end headphones. Thanks to positive reviews and celebrity endorsements—Katie Holmes and the NBA’s LeBron James have been photographed with them—kids raised on MP3s were soon ditching their $10 earbuds. But there’s no sense paying up to $400 for headphones if they’re going to be plugged into a computer—which is how almost 90 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 listen to music, says Iovine. That’s why this week, Beats and Hewlett-Packard are launching the Envy 17, a notebook that comes with an in-built subwoofer.

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A slow-burn bonfire of liberties

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 285 Comments

Suzanne Plunkett/ Reuters

At the time of writing, I have no idea who’s won the British general election. At the time of reading, you probably have. But, whatever the result, I doubt it will make much difference to the fate of the United Kingdom, which is in the fast lane of the not-so-slow-burn bonfire of the liberties consuming much of the Western world.

The official “defining moment” of the campaign was Gordon Brown’s unguarded post-photo-op dismissal of Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman.” Mrs. Duffy, a plain-spoken working-class granny and lifelong Labour voter, had made the mistake of asking Mr. Brown, her party leader, a very mild question about immigrants from eastern Europe. He got back in his car and wrote her off, forgetting he was still miked. So she’s a “bigot.” He’s not. That’s why he makes all the decisions for her, and she just makes the best of them. What part of that don’t you understand?

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Knowledge is power. See also: knives, crystal meth

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 1:23 AM - 26 Comments

Pardon me while I clear some bile on a strictly local topic. An elected official of the City of Edmonton stood up today to declare us a “City of Learners”. There is no record of anyone pointing out that such a thing, if it actually meant more than opportunistic civic wankery, would involve having a big central library that people could visit safely. You could even argue that this condition is essential to possessing any respectability at all as a “city”, let alone one peopled by “learners”. Continue…

This fixed-term election law is built to last

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:54 AM - 58 Comments

I’m quite certain this is wrong:

The mother of all Parliaments has taught Canada a lesson. We have some for her, too.

Britain’s new government has demonstrated that coalition governments are possible, even outside of wartime, in the modern era of Westminster-style parliaments…

New British Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal-Democrat deputy Nick Clegg have even devised a new plan to ensure stability in a hung Parliament: a five-year fixed term for elections to be set out in law. …

But another part of that agreed law is less likely to fly: changing the convention so that it will take 55 per cent of MPs to defeat the government. That would effectively give Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives, with 47 per cent of MPs, a veto on its own survival….

So the fixed-term bill appears to make it impossible for Mr. Cameron to call an election. But it probably can’t bind Mr. Clegg from splitting away and forcing one – given a pretext, and good polls. And if Mr. Clegg can’t be bound, it’s not impossible for Mr. Cameron to trigger a split by pushing measures the Liberal Democrats can’t accept.

If this were true, that it would take a vote of the 55% of the House to defeat the government — if, henceforth, the standard of confidence would no longer be the support of a majority of the House, but 45% — it would quite literally mean that the Cameron government, with 47% of the seats, could not be defeated. The budget, the Queen’s Speech, its entire legislative program could be rejected, but it could never be removed from office, for the life of the Parliament. The Conservatives could govern as long as they liked, with or without the support of the Lib Dems.

There is no way that any party would propose such constitutionally dubious legislation, and certainly no way that the Lib Dems would agree to it, since it would be signing away the very bargaining power they had just won. It’s nonsensical.

In fact, if you look at the text of the Conservative-Lib Dem accord, it doesn’t say 55% would be required to defeat the government. It says 55% would be required for “dissolution,” that is for dissolving the House and calling an election. This is a crucial difference. Significantly, too, the provision comes at the tag end of the paragraph establishing a fixed five-year term of government. Because it’s the guarantee of it.

What it means is that if the government were defeated in the House — by the usual 50% margin — Prime Minister Cameron could not simply go the Queen and ask for dissolution. He would have to get a vote of 55% of the House to permit him to do so. So he could not wriggle out of the coalition, or the commitment to a five-year term, by engineering his own defeat (still less do what Stephen Harper did, and call a snap election, without even the fig-leaf of defeat to justify the breach).

If he were to propose legislation that was obnoxious to his Lib Dem partners, they could always combine with the opposition to defeat it. But Cameron could not use this as a pretext to force an election, because he couldn’t get the 55% needed for dissolution — not without the Lib Dems. An election would only follow defeat on a confidence matter if the Lib Dems agreed it should; but they might instead decide to enter into a coalition with Labour and the other parties. So Cameron’s power is significantly constrained by the 55% rule, and he can’t get rid of the rule because he’d need the Lib Dems’ votes to do that, too.

For their part, the Lib Dems could not force an election on their own, either: they have enough votes, in combination with the other parties (53%) to defeat the government, but not enough to meet the 55% dissolution standard. Only if both parties agreed (or, more fancifully, if the Tories and Labour voted together) could Parliament be dissolved.

So the two coalition partners could together break their promise of a fixed five-year term, and pay the political consequences. But there is no way one can double-cross the other, and force an election on its own. This isn’t like Canada, in other words. To unlock this election law, you need two keys.

CODA: The Globe story gets this part right, however:

Canada’s fixed-election law had an out, because it had to. Calling elections is the Crown’s power, and our Parliament can’t change that without a constitutional amendment approved by provinces. So the fixed-term law left the Governor-General’s ability to launch elections whole, and Mr. Harper asked for one.

Britain’s similar, but not the same. They have no written constitution, and Parliament can limit the Crown’s powers. Its coalition can pass a fixed-term law.

That much is true. It’s easier to amend the British constitution than ours. It’s not quite true to say, however, that Britain doesn’t have a written constitution. Magna Carta is written down, as is the Bill of Rights 1689 and sundry other documents and laws that together make up the British Constitution. It just isn’t written down in one place. But then, neither is ours. It comprises the 1867 Constitution, the 1982 one, plus all of the constitutional principles, conventions and precedents we inherited from the Brits.

Meanwhile, in Guergis

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 11:46 PM - 65 Comments

The private investigator says the Prime Minister’s Office did not accurately report to the ethics commissioner the information he passed on to them. He says he has no evidence as to the conduct of Ms. Guergis in his “possession or knowledge.” The concern, he says, was “optics.” He says Mr. Jaffer was the “back door” to federal funding and Liberal party president Alf Apps was Nazim Gillani’s “getaway driver.” Mr. Gillani responds. Mr. Apps’ law firm says Mr. Apps was briefly on retainer to Mr. Gillani, but the law firm declined to do work with Mr. Gillani and the retainer was returned. And CBC reports that the private investigator arrived in Ottawa driving a nice car.